Jack Murray, Sheriff

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Tears rained down her cheeks, although she could not—would not—let him hear them. “Yes. You did. Not just last night, either. You’ve been crazy for a long time now.”

  He was silent for a long moment. “I’ve been drinking.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “I went to AA last night.”

  Surprise held her silent.

  “If I can’t make it on my own, I’ll check in to a treatment place. But I think I can do it. I want to see Steph and Lauren again.”

  A hand closed over her heart. “Is that a demand?”

  “No, I…” He noisily cleared his throat. “I have to earn the right. I know that. I’m…asking. Hoping.”

  She said nothing. Was this complete humility a ploy? How was she ever to believe him again?

  “Say something.” His plea was ragged. “I love Steph and Lauren. I never meant…”

  “To hurt them? But you did.” How hard she sounded!

  Suddenly he was crying. “I didn’t mean… When I saw her face…”

  “Stephanie’s?”

  “She hates me, doesn’t she? She should.” He struggled with the sobs, mastered them. Voice gritty, her ex-husband said, “They’re all I have to live for. Please give me the chance to make it up to them.”

  “With candy and late movies?”

  Another silence. “You can’t forgive anything I’ve done, can you?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe eventually.”

  “I want to be their father. That’s all. I’m begging, Beth. Please. Give me a chance.”

  She was shocked to have to wonder whether she was enjoying his desperation. How much did she want him to crawl?

  Heaven help her, was she really any better than Jack, who had given an ugly smile when Ray’s blood splattered?

  “Yes. Of course.” She closed her eyes wearily. “You can talk to them. I’m not going to force them to visit you, not if they’re afraid. But you can come see them this weekend, as long as you’re sober.”

  He sucked in a breath. Voice low, Ray said, “Thank you, Beth. I’ll come Saturday. One o’clock, if that’s okay.”

  “One o’clock,” she repeated, before adding, “I’ve supported you as a father all along, not for your sake but for theirs. I thought they needed you. I’m not so sure anymore.” It was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to say, but she had no choice. “Ray, I’m going to be plain here. This is your last chance. If you scare them again, I’ll go to court and have your visitation rescinded. Don’t think that I won’t.” She didn’t wait for a response. Instead, Beth quietly hung up the telephone without saying goodbye.

  I have to open the door to him, she had once told Jack. Now she knew the enemy for certain, yet still she had to invite him in. He was her children’s father. How could she not?

  CHAPTER TEN

  CONSIDERING he hadn’t known the woman all that long, he was sure as hell taking her rejection hard. Jack went through every stage of grief from denial to depression, A to Z.

  During denial he called Beth several times, leaving messages on her answering machine that went unanswered. She’d have awakened the next day and realized she was wrong about him, he convinced himself. That distant thank-you speech she left on his answering machine was meant to be conciliatory.

  Yeah? Then why didn’t she return his calls?

  Because she didn’t want to talk to him, Jack finally had to admit. If he hadn’t finished himself off in her eyes by slamming her husband’s face against her refrigerator and leaving his blood for her to clean up, he had done the deed by cloaking himself in outrage and accusing her of hypocrisy.

  What the hell else had he expected? She was scared to death of her creep of an ex-husband, who’d just hurt her. Then the two men had fought across her kitchen; she’d seen the father of her children slammed to the floor and cuffed; she’d had to comfort her daughter who’d seen the same. And what does her knight errant do? Jack mocked himself. Dry her tears? Accept her hysterics?

  Nah. He’d lashed back with words damn near as vicious as her husband’s heavy hand.

  Now he wanted her to call with soft apologies. If anybody owed those, it was him.

  But that message, the one in which he groveled, didn’t win a response, either.

  Somewhere in there he hit the stage of grief called anger. Beth had used him, he decided. Or maybe she was getting back together with the bastard. Women did that all the time. Call the cops, scream, “He’s hitting me! Please come. I’m so afraid!” Then refuse to file charges, and next thing you knew they were a happy couple again.

  Only, from what he heard she wasn’t backing down, and Ray Sommers wasn’t fighting the charges. Wally Stevens, the arresting officer, said when he returned Jack’s call, “The guy’s going to AA every day, I hear. Ms. Sommers says she’s agreed to let him talk to the children this weekend, with no other concessions on her part. Hell, maybe this was a one-time thing.”

  “One-time? He’s been stalking her!”

  “Booze muddies a man’s thinking.”

  “You’re starting to sound like all those pathetic women who plead with their men to come home.” Jack realized his lips were drawn back from his teeth. Why was his temper stirring at the mildest of suggestions that Ray Sommers might have some redeeming qualities? For Lauren and Stephanie Sommers’s sakes, he should hope so.

  “I’m waiting to make a judgment,” the ESPD detective said, not rising to meet Jack’s irritation.

  “I don’t like the guy,” he growled in explanation.

  “You have good reason.”

  But not necessarily the ones he should have, Jack thought in disgust once he’d hung up. There he went again, rummaging in his soul as if it were a junk drawer on his tool bench. As he drew out bits and pieces, he could feel and see the rust, crumbly and red as dried blood. His fingers stuck to gluey, unidentified globs covered not with hair and dirt from being in the bottom of the drawer, but rather with petty or cruel things he’d done or said, with memories of pleasure taken in the way a man quailed at a nightstick or business end of a revolver.

  Sitting right there in his government-decorated office, starkly lit by fluorescent panels, his desk as untidy as his secretary would let it become, Jack was suddenly somewhere else. Somebody else.

  He was Johnny Murray, teenage jock, cocky as hell because he’d aced a physics final that morning and because the prettiest girl in school was his. Not only his, but so hungry for him she’d talked him into sneaking off campus at lunchtime to go to her house, empty with Daddy at work. Which meant she wanted him bad, right?

  Johnny was so damned horny, he kept grabbing her breasts and nibbling on her neck right there in her living room.

  Of course, she wanted to be persuaded. She was worried about her father coming home for lunch.

  “In the middle of the day?” He put all the force of his charm into his grin. “You said yourself he never does.”

  “Yes, but…” She closed her eyes when he peeled her shirt over her head. “We should…at least…go up to my bedroom.” On a gasp, she let her head fall back and he nipped the silky flesh. “In case…” she whispered.

  “In case what?” He sucked on her breast and thought he might explode.

  “In case…”

  “Your dad’s not coming home,” he said with absolute confidence. Her musky scent rose as he peeled off her panties.

  Oh, she was sweet and hot. He couldn’t wait. Her fingers were fumbling now with the buttons on his fly. The little butterfly touches, tap, tap, tap, were sweet torture. Jack ran his hands up and down her smooth thighs, squeezing her buttocks.

  He was on his knees, his jeans around his ankles, stroking her and ready to ram home, when some sound jarred him from the mood.

  “Oh, my God!” Meg screamed. “Johnny!”

  He fell backward onto his butt and tried to stagger to his feet as he yanked his jeans up. A frantic glance showed her father standing in the living room doorway. Even when he was be
ing polite, Police Chief Ed Patton was intimidating. Today, his face purple with rage and his hand resting on the butt of his gun, he was scary.

  Hands shaking, Johnny half turned away and tried to get his fly buttoned over a woody. He was swearing silently, stupid with shock. What would her father do? He wouldn’t shoot Jack, would he?

  “Get dressed,” Chief Patton said, in this dead, cold voice.

  Meg’s face was bleached of color; she stared up at her father as if he were a cobra rearing above her, ready to strike.

  “Get dressed!” Patton bellowed. “I won’t have a whore sitting here naked in my living room!”

  Though terrified, Johnny was impelled to protest. “Sir, I…” He was humiliated when his voice cracked. “It’s not her fault,” he tried to say. “I…”

  Her father crossed the room swiftly. Johnny didn’t even see his fist coming. Just…crack. He fell across the coffee table, blood splattering and blinding him.

  Meg was screaming; he could hear her. A grenade seemed to explode against his chest. Agony blossomed. He tried to lift his cheek from the solid wood top of the coffee table to tell Meg he was all right and to quiet her screaming. Through the haze of pain and blood, he saw her father clobber her before swinging back around.

  “Get up,” he ordered. His boot lashed out again, sending Johnny tumbling back off the table.

  On his hands and knees, he retched.

  “Get up. Face me like a man.”

  Somehow, Johnny shoved himself to his feet and staggered upright. He tried to wipe the blood from his face.

  The most merciless eyes he’d ever seen drilled him. “How do you feel about my daughter?”

  “I…” The pain was unbearable, shrinking his world to a desire to escape this room. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you ever going to touch her again?”

  He would have said anything. “No, sir.”

  “Call her?” Patton snapped.

  Johnny shook his head. He was going to pass out. He knew it. The floor wanted to rush upward. Bile gathered in his throat.

  “See her?”

  One eye was swollen shut. He closed the other so that he couldn’t see her staring, staring, from where she still sat on the couch.

  “No,” he whispered.

  Ed Patton’s fist slammed into his face, just below the swollen eye. The pain was so intense Johnny thought he was dying as he crashed to the floor again. This time the scream was Johnny’s, as high-pitched as a girl’s.

  “What if she calls you?” that hard, cruel voice asked.

  He couldn’t get to his feet. Johnny began crawling toward the door.

  The booted foot smashed into his ribs again. “What if she calls you?”

  His guts heaving, Johnny cried, “I’ll hang up.”

  One more kick. “Then get the hell out of here!”

  Somehow he did get up. Reeling, almost falling, he made it to the door, staggered out. Clinging to the rail, he got down the porch steps and threw himself into his beater.

  Instinct more than vision got the key into the ignition; he slammed his foot onto the accelerator and rocketed back into the street without looking to see if another car was coming.

  Get away. Get away. Get away.

  He didn’t think about her. Didn’t think about anything but his own miserable, sniveling hide.

  He got away, all right, and left her to face…what?

  All Johnny could find out, when he secretly called her house two days later, was that Meg was gone.

  A sixteen-year-old girl had had to face the devil alone, because he’d abandoned her. Something terrible had happened to her. Maybe she was even dead.

  Because he’d let her old man beat the crap out of him. Hadn’t even fought back. No, he’d just tucked his tail between his legs and run as fast as he could without even thinking about her.

  What did that make him?

  Unfortunately, Johnny Murray looked at his swollen face in the mirror the next day and knew….

  “Sheriff?” asked a voice from the doorway.

  Jack swung around so fast, he bashed his foot on the desk. “What?” he snapped.

  The young sergeant inched backward until not much more than his nose showed around the door frame. “Uh…uh, telephone call. Sir. Chief Patton. Sir.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  At the quiet click of the door, Jack planted his elbows on his desk, buried his face in his hands and knotted his fingers in his short dark hair. Damn. Double damn.

  What in hell was wrong with him, tumbling back in the past so far he lost sight of the present?

  He wasn’t that sniveling kid anymore. Twenty years of history had passed under the bridge. He wasn’t just a cop, but sheriff of the whole of Butte County. He’d taken Ed Patton’s job as chief of the Elk Springs P.D. and done it better than that bastard ever could, and then he’d one upped him by being elected sheriff of the larger law enforcement agency.

  He had no reason—goddamn it, no reason—still to sweat when he remembered Johnny Murray. Johnny Murray, jock, 3.75 GPA high school student, who thought the world came easy, was dead and buried. He’s dug his own grave, said the requiems and been born again.

  Jack Murray ran from no man.

  Instead, he splattered other men’s blood with his fist. He saw it, thick sullen droplets running and smearing on the shiny white door of the refrigerator, right below a cartoonish schoolgirl drawing of a home surrounded by comically bright trees and flowers.

  Jack gave his hair a painful yank and lifted his head.

  Not his fist! He hadn’t punched Ray Sommers. Hadn’t meant to hurt him. He was not Ed Patton reincarnated.

  Yeah? he mocked himself, a cruel edge to his reflections. Didn’t seem as if he’d quite convinced himself, any more than he was confident bone-deep that Johnny Murray had stayed buried. Hell of a man he was: not sure whether he was a brute who enjoyed hurting other people or a gutless wonder who would still save his own skin even if it meant throwing a woman to the wolves.

  The red light on his telephone flashed rhythmically. Renee Patton. Could be worse. Might be Meg calling to find out if he’d talked to their son recently. The son she would have told him about that day, if Johnny Murray hadn’t crawled away and left her to her fate.

  He shook his head again like a wounded animal and finally made a guttural sound, stabbing the blinking light and picking up the receiver. He’d summoned other voices from his past—why not add one, right here on the telephone?

  “Murray here.”

  “Hi, this is Renee. Am I interrupting something?”

  A bath in self-pity.

  “Nah. What can I do for you?”

  “We had a jewelry store robbery last night. Not as crude as you’d expect. This had the feel of a pro. I wonder if you’ve heard of others.”

  He sharpened to attention. “Yeah, yeah. Let me think.”

  It took him a minute, but he remembered a similar heist in a jewelry store in Juanita, a small resort town that fed on the ski area, and another he’d heard about in Bend.

  Renee made thoughtful sounds and took notes. He gave her what names and numbers he could and asked her to keep him informed.

  Then, on impulse, he said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.” She sounded surprised. “What’s up?”

  He was already sorry he’d opened his mouth. How did he say, Are you a better cop than I am?

  “I handled a domestic disturbance call the other day.”

  “You did?” Surprise had edged into astonishment. The sheriff of a large county handled politicians, not drunken husbands.

  “A neighbor. The little girl called me because she was scared.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He rubbed his chest where his esophagus was burning. “Afterward, the woman was angry at me. She claimed her ex and I were two of a kind. But, damn it, I handled him the only way I knew how!” He let out a breath that harrumphed. More evenly, Jack continued, “I don’t like to think I�
��m too much like your father. You and I have worked together for a long time. So tell me—do I use force too readily? Do I look like I enjoy hurting somebody?”

  “No.” Renee Patton didn’t even hesitate. “I won’t lie to you, Jack. There was a time when I wasn’t so sure. Not that you were like him. You never were. To him everything was black and white. Somebody did wrong, Chief Patton smashed him like a bug. People thought he was hard on crime. Victims groups hailed him. But they were all wrong. He did what he did because he enjoyed every minute of it. Do you remember that poor bastard who was going to torch his girlfriend’s house? The one who lit himself on fire and died in agony while my father laughed?” Her shudder came through the telephone connection. “That was Ed Patton. You are not and never were anything like him.”

  “But?” He waited for what she hadn’t said.

  “You wore blinkers. The victims were the only ones whose humanity you saw. On a domestic disturbance call, her pain, her fear, blinded you to the pain and shame in his eyes. I was never sure why that was.”

  With sudden clarity, he knew. He had been the victim.

  “You’ve changed, Jack. You’ve…softened. I mean that in the best way.”

  Still he sat silent.

  “Tell me what happened. Since I’m being brutally honest, I’ll tell you if I’d have done anything differently.”

  He sounded as emotional as a kid standing up in front of a class giving a report on Ethiopia or Belize. The hardest part was admitting to his initial hesitation.

  When he was done, Renee said, “What’s giving you pause about this? What could you have done differently?” She sounded genuinely puzzled.

  “Talked him into walking away, maybe.”

  “You think he was going to stroll out with you?”

  “No.” Ray Sommers had been incapable of rational decision at that point.

  “What if he’d hit her one more time? What if he’d really hurt her?”

  “What are you saying?” Jack asked. “That you would have jumped the bastard, too?”

  “I’d have done exactly what you did, except I might have pulled my gun. If he was as crazed as you describe and he’d ignored me, I might even have had to shoot him. That woman complaining doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Renee said flatly. “Go in peace, Sheriff.”